Pay-day was also the time for squaring accounts.  “The human species,” Charles Lamb says, “is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.”  This was true of our office, but no equal division prevailed as the borrowers predominated and the lenders, the prudent, were a small minority.  A general settlement took place monthly, after which a new period began—­by the borrowers with joyous unconcern.  “Take no thought for the morrow” was a maxim dear to the heart of these knights of the pen.

Swearing, as I have said, was not considered low or vulgar or unbecoming a gentleman.  There was a senior clerk of some standing and position, a married man of thirty-five or forty years of age, who gloried in it.  His expletives were varied, vivid and inexhaustible, and the turbid stream was easily set flowing.  Had he lived a century earlier he might have been put in the stocks for his profanity, a punishment which magistrates were then, by Act of Parliament, empowered to inflict.  He was a strange individual. Long Jack he was called.  He is not in this world now so I may write of him with freedom.

No one’s enemy but his own, he was kindly, good-natured, generous to a fault, but devil-may-care and reckless; and, at any one’s expense, or at any cost to himself, would have his fling and his joke.

It was from his lankiness and length of limb that he was called “Long Jack.”  He stood about six feet six in his boots.  He must have had means of his own, as he lived in a way far beyond the reach of even a senior clerk of the first degree.  How he came to be in a railway office, or, being in, retained his place, was a matter of wonder.  Sad to tell, he had a little daughter, five or six years of age; his only child, a sweet, blue-eyed golden-haired little fairy, who, never corrected, imitated her father’s profanity, and apparently to his great delight.  He treated it as a joke, as he treated everything. Long Jack loved to scandalise the town by his eccentricities.  He would compound with the butcher, to drive his fast trotting horse and trap and deliver their joints, their steaks and kidneys to astonished customers, or arrange with the milkman to dispense the early morning milk, donning a milkman’s smock, and carrying two milk-pails on foot.  I remember one Good Friday morning when he perambulated the town with a donkey cart and sold, at an early hour, hot cross buns at the houses of his friends, afterwards gleefully boasting of having made a good profit on the morning’s business.  In the sixties and early seventies throughout the clerical staff of the Midland Railway were many who had not been brought up as clerks, who, somehow or other had drifted into the service, whose early avocations had been of various kinds, and whose appearance, habits and manners imparted a picturesqueness to office life which does not exist to-day, and among these. Long Jack was a prominent, but despite his joviality, it seems to me a pathetic figure.